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Proceso 936
January 24, 2001
ISSN 0259-9864
Editorial The
falling of the democratic facade
Communications How
the print media covered the earthquake
THE FALLING OF THE DEMOCRATIC FACADE
The earthquake has exposed the structure of the Salvadoran reality, taking away its false ideological cover-up. Even though alarming for everybody, it did not affect people evenly. The immense majority of poor, for whom living was already hard and now it is even harder, suffered the biggest impact. Most of the victims --dead, hurt, missing, homeless, hungry and sick-- were among the deprived majority, except for those who died buried by a landslide in a middle class neighborhood. Those victims claim for a fair distribution of the aid that they consider theirs. One of the victims, without realizing the irony, considered that the dispossessed are in better conditions at present than before, because they are now getting food regularly, despite their eternal miserable conditions. The same pattern can be observed on the other side, that is the Committee of National Solidarity (CONASOL, in Spanish).
Members of such governmental committee, which collects, delivers and controls the official aid for the victims of the earthquake, are bank owners and important businessmen, all of them either close to or members of the party in the power (ARENA). Trying to avoid corruption, President Flores gave the responsibility of administering the official relief to these important businessmen, who are called “the rich” by the poor. Nevertheless, this commission is close related to ARENA and the government. For this reason, Monsignor Gregorio Rosa Chávez observed that the CONASOL was just a branch of the official party. Seeking efficiency, and partisan loyalty above all, the government excluded the rest of the social groups at the beginning, a decision that is considered a sign of weakness.
Thus, the earthquake made evident the fragmentation of the Salvadoran society. It is clear the polarization between a rich minority forming the emergency committee, which shows its good will, remorse or perhaps both, and a majority, which is supposed to be submissive and accept what the former wants to offer, whenever and in the way it decides to do it. The division inevitably separates the majority, negatively affected by the earthquake, which took away almost everything from the victims, and the privileged minority, exempt from this kind of risks. This minority is only willing to relieve the immediate effects of the disaster, but it is not willing to lose its privileges giving the resources for the victims to restore their former conditions, nor even to improve them. In fact, its role is reduced to administrate the international aid, giving up an insignificant part from its property. There cannot be solidarity where exclusion, supremacy and preponderance of an elite prevail.
However, the majority has made its needs be heard. Voices claiming assistance and protesting have accused the Salvadoran government and the rich for their disgrace. They blame neither the nature nor God for their situation. The language used by the earthquake victims has been tough and comes from deeply inside. The governmental emergency committee’s constitution made the breach between the two social groups even bigger. One week after the earthquake, the government had to rethink its strategy and incorporate the municipal authorities in the distribution of the official aid.
This crisis has made evident the inability of the government to manage the public treasury. The government was not even able to establish with certainty the magnitude of the earthquake. No public official has been able to determine how many people died, were hurt, as well as how many are still missing and how many homes and buildings were destroyed or damaged. The lack of coordination and the struggle among some governmental institutions are a consequence of their inability to manage an emergency situation. Facing its own weakness, the government answered with centralization, reducing its potential to solve the problems. Being extremely rigorous with what it is receiving from different countries, the government prefers to have clear numbers about everything than relieving the needs of the population, which is claiming immediate assistance. In contrast, the government has shown the cold face of a strict administrator.
If El Salvador had a network of mayors and local emergency committees, well organized, the victims would have been assisted in a much more immediate, efficient and human way. The current centralization of activities is excessive, given the extent of the catastrophe. The government is so centralized that it does not have local representatives who could support all its aid activities and provide information about the damages and the needs. Instead of distributing the work among the local authorities, ARENA chose to have all the governmental activities centralized, including those that required more efficiency. This centralization is what is making the CONASOL lose. ARENA’s resistance to decentralize the government is the main obstacle to meet the needs of the population. This obstacle has been built by the government and its party, and both have entrenched themselves behind it, fearing the progress of the political opposition and of the society itself. This selfish and non-human attitude represents an important danger for the victims, who are living in the open air and suffering abandonment. Political interests are more powerful than reason. Given the government’s inability to cope with the emergency, it seems as if this were the first earthquake in the country and as if El Salvador never experienced a hurricane, a flood nor an epidemic.
The unlimited centralization has increased the distance between the government and the society. This isolation is creating more problems for the government and the businessmen. Their attitude implies certain fear towards the society in general, including social organizations, victims of the earthquake, the municipalities, and the press. Therefore, it is not surprising that the aid’s control turned out in the censorship of information. The idea of an absolute control of the power is one of the more important weaknesses of the government and ARENA. Some people are asking for understanding from the victims. Those people are considering consummated errors as simple faults caused by the earthquake’s magnitude. They should not forget that it is the power ambition and the desire for absolute control what has been observed in the last decade and the earthquake came to unveil the false democratic cover up of such ambition.
According to this analysis, the Salvadoran society is not conciliated yet; division and conflict are still present. Not only do human rights violations divide it, but also the harshness of the social and economic situation in the country. Even though the lack of conciliation was already becoming evident when the government announced that the local currency would be substituted by the dollar, the earthquake has revealed a reality that some people considered forgotten.
COMMUNICATIONSHOW THE PRINT MEDIA COVERED THE EARTHQUAKE
A Salvadoran journalist, shocked
at the loss of his wife’s family after the earthquake, wrote: “It is so
awful to be behind the fight line, that is in front of the cameras and
zooms of the sensationalist birds of prey. I do not want anybody to experience
the same situation.” The press should learn from the incident of this fellow
worker and be more sensible (without being excessively dramatic) before
another’s suffering. Tragedies such as the January 13 earthquake might
serve us now to test the professionalism of the Salvadoran press and the
role of the news media.
This commentary aims to examine the press coverage given by the two main Salvadoran newspapers, La Prensa Gráfica and El Diario de Hoy, to the most recent natural disaster in the country. It will also attempt to point out the contributions of the mass media during this kind of emergencies, as well as the journalistic weaknesses of reporters and editors. It analyzes from January 14 through January 21.
According to the style handbook of the Spanish newspaper El País, it is very important to report on the victims and the causes of their death during natural disasters and national emergencies. Next, the press is supposed to cover rescue activities, damage evaluations, evacuations, material costs, warnings, authorities’ advise for the population, pillage activities, and insurance information. In addition to these reports, the two newspapers analyzed gave information about the international aid received by the government and about the efforts of the authorities to collect and distribute some relief.
As for the contributions of the print media during this period, it was important the information that they were passing on about missing people. They also turned on warnings for the people to prevent epidemics in the provisional shelters created right after the earthquake. More than one person surely benefited from the technical explanations given about the origins of the earthquake, as well as from the circulation of e-mail messages published in the newspapers contacting people in the country and all over the world.
La Prensa Gráfica was especially careful in giving advise for the people to protect themselves during the seismic activity that followed the earthquake. It also created lists with emergency telephone numbers, helpful for the newspaper readers. It gave some orientations for a self-evaluation of house damages and indicated the most secure places inside the houses to prevent more tragedies. In addition, it was an admirable act of La Prensa Gráfica to donate a colón for each issue sold in January 22 as a contribution for the victims of the earthquake (a similar donation had been announced by a Spanish newspaper a few days before).
The news media (channel 12 with more insistence than the rest of them) made certain pressure to make the central government change its “strategy” of help distribution for the victims of the disaster. The demands over the issue that food supplies, mattresses and water would actually get to the shelters across the country obligated president Francisco Flores to address a speech throughout national television on January 21, with the purpose of “clarifying” how, to that day, the supplies stored at the National Emergency Committee (COEN) had been distributed.
It was not until the victims appeared in the media complaining over the long delay of help, that president Flores decided to involve city governments, churches and other organizations that could make effective the delivery of donations to the most damaged municipalities. The information that dozens of foreign correspondents sent to donor countries must have represented another great pressure on this issue as well.
Information services were surely the most wanted by the population shortly after the tragedy, and the two morning papers analyzed in this article made efforts to provide the assistance demanded on them. The first thing that many people did minutes after the earthquake was turn from their radios to listen to the news and (if there was electricity) to watch television to know the proportions of the disaster, or simply to find out which street to take without getting caught on a traffic jam.
The lack of disaster prevention planning was the topic at the center pages in Enfoques of La Prensa Gráfica, on January 21, one of the most serious journalistic efforts to go deep into the conditions that aggravated the tragedy at “Las Colinas”. This zone focused the media´s attention and, for many days, it kept them from seeing further than the city area, all the way down to the forgotten towns far from the city.
With an emphasis in “Las Colinas”, Enfoques made a reflection about the Cordillera del Bálsamo, and the efforts that some organizations did, since the late eighties, to protect its ecological area. The COEN is called “the master of improvisation” in another of the articles at Enfoques, which questions, above all, the lack of policies to face emergencies due to earthquakes, that should not be a surprise for any of the authorities.
However, the information service did not seem to be one of the main features of the Salvadoran media, busy (and many times tied-up) with the landslide drama and the dead, and the survivors, and the victims… In the following pages we will reflect over those emphasis, in some way justified during the firs days, but turned excesive after a period of time.
Newspapers (with less frequency and less treachery
than the MAS magazine and the news programs on channels 2, 4 and
6) made the mistake of turning the facts into a drama show. In the words
of Spanish journalist Carlos González Regiosa, journalists
have the tendency to turn scandal into “the single objective or, at
least, into the main one. With the predictable result of a journalistic
initiative loss, as a consequence of a subjection to excitement in a continuous
demand for horror, scandal and flashy events… in return of higher sales
(and in order to obtain more advertising, as a result)”.
The bad habits that aggravate in the news media during moments of crisis, according to some experts, are trivialization, fragmentation, and the tendency to make the spectacular and the dramatic stand out, as well as the lack of verification on the authenticity of issues that are made public, because of the emergency. Those bad habits appeared in the journalistic treatment in almost every communication media, even though none exceeds television at the exploitation they did (and keep doing) of the images.
Two days after the earthquake, there was plenty of large-sized photographs in the Salvadoran morning papers that showed painful scenes, mutilated corpses recently rescued from the rubbish, and the sadly famous area of “Las Colinas”. In El Diario de Hoy, there was too much insistence in personal feature stories on the horror and the suffering that the victims and the relatives of the deceased felt. Substance was lost many times among the anecdotes. There was a lack of depth and an overdose of sensationalism, mostly in the headlines.
Even though dramatic news are justified in certain occasions and in certain amounts, El Diario de Hoy in this case abused and trespassed the boundaries of the acceptable with its pictures, and specially its articles. A female journalist of this paper, for example, asked a young woman that was crying next to a body: “Did he die because of the earthquake?”. An example of these foolish questions that reporters usually ask in emergency cases, and that they also ask even in situations that actually give them time to think what to ask without insisting in the obvious.
The covering of the morning newspapers was also characterized by an excessive emphasis on the (already) dramatic situation after the earthquake. Enfoques distanced itself a bit on this “guide line” in their January 21 edition. Generally, the insistence on drama was accompanied by a disorganized abundance of facts without a conducting line of thought. The pouring information (both morning papers filled over 40 pages during the first days of emergency) was a valid resource only one or two days after the earthquake.
German journalist Tony Keppeler, resident in El Salvador, points out that only after January 20, the newspapers came out of the triviality of reporting personal tragedies, isolated complaints, and the counting of the victims. Summing it up, the papers did not take advantage of what makes them different from radio or television: depth and analysis.
During the following days, the abundance of facts caused plenty of confusion (because the media were contradicting themselves), and also generated unnecessary alarm among the affected ones. For example, the two morning papers fell into the confusion created by the local observatory, about the magnitude of the earthquake, which until this day keeps measuring at 5.2 of the Richter scale, meanwhile the papers have adopted the 7.6, based on data provided by foreign geological observatories.
The efforts to inspire calm in the population after the tremendous tragedy and the trauma were scarce, and in both morning papers prevailed news that would not do more than raise the fear and the suffering among the readers, whose amount surely increases during an emergency.
The demand for more agile mechanisms in the distribution of aid for the victims was done coldly by the two morning papers. The inefficiency of the COEN and the Committee of National Solidarity (CONASOL) were harshly criticized mostly by channel 12, with an insistence that was extreme for some people, given the proximity of the earthquake.
The conservative El Diario de Hoy, in its editorials, did not more than support the “faultless” prestige of the CONASOL members, their “absolute integrity and great experience”. It seems that such attributes were not enough to ease the needs of the shelters and those of the victims. In the end, they acknowledged the importance of the city governments participation, and that of other local institutions in that line of work. The claims made by the media, in this sense, had their share of effects, even though the government “strategy” change is not an exclusive triumph of the press.
If it had not been for the efforts of Enfoques, a week after the earthquake, the written press would not have shown a meaningful improvement at explaining, for example, the tragedy at Las Colinas. According to correspondent Toni Keppeler, when disasters of such magnitude occur, “the papers are so focused into the covering logistic that they do not think”.
About the information sources that appeared on both morning papers, even after the first days of the tragedy, the versions of government sources prevailed (as president Francisco Flores, a cabinet member, members of the COEN and CONASOL). The municipal authorities as well as other organizations close to the settlements were left out.
Besides these problems, in plenty of occasions journalists showed once again their personal ambitions to stand out, of turning themselves into news after the recent earthquake. The most unsuitable incident in the media was between the news director of channel 12, Mauricio Funes, and the news director of El Diario de Hoy, Enrique Altamirano. There were plenty of editorials in both journalistic organizations, as a reflection of ideological polarization which prevails in certain areas of the salvadorean society. In those editorials, Funes as well as Altamirano presented themselves as the defenders of the highest virtues and purposes in the informative task.
No matter how reasonable (or unreasonable) both points
of view were, it would seem far more reasonable to discuss them on
a personal level, without the whole neighborhood knowing about
their temper tantrums, and make those issues public only
if it is of social concern at this moments of tragedy. The news directors
at channel 12 and at El Diario de Hoy would be better off orienting
their reporters in order to improve their informative services towards
the inspiration of a more safe environment among the victims (without falling
into the jingles that have been broadcasted through the radio and television)
instead of aggravating the desperation.
As a minimum effort, the press should not repeat certain attitudes such as the ones they adopted when it was known that Sergio Moreno, the young man who resisted over 30 hours buried under the rubbish in Las Colinas. Sergio´s mother, Celina de Moreno, told El Diario de Hoy that her son dreamed of becoming a journalist. “That´s why I contained my anger when they were pulling him out and I saw the crowd of photographers and camera man standing over the amount of soil that was on the hill; the closer they walked to it, the more soil that would fall on my son… I felt as if they were going to bury him again”.